[Swift-devel] Requests for improvements to error messages and logging

[Michael Wilde]

Sarah will be shifting some of her effort (~40%) from CNARI to focus on Swift development.

Her focus is going to be on error message and logging improvement: anything related to helping the user quickly and easily understand what went wrong in their script and correct the problem.  Broadly, I think status monitoring (eg the progress output and -tui displays) fall into this category as well, as does log formatting and certainly error message content.

I'd like to suggest we use bugzilla for tracking requests for such improvements (and in general get bugzilla more firmly into our process).

In the meantime, some candidates I'd like to propose for improvement:

- put simple friendly timestamps on the progress indicators

- snap more info from cmd line, sites, tc, and swift.properties into the log

- make stdout/err and job failure info go to the log as soon as errors occur, rather than buffering them to show up at the end of the log (as users often ^C out of swift and never see these errors)

- diagnose the error codes 1 and 254 error messages that occur on the execution site at run time, and produce better error messages.

- create a log filter to lift the salient info about job execution out of the log into a simple readable stream that would make sense to users at all levels of expertise.  Ie, what was transfered to and executed where, when, and for how long.

This is going to be a long process and will need a lot of input, but I wanted to provide you some places to start focusing on, Sarah.

- Mike